Sculpture Showing Grief

Melancholy, by Albert Gyorgy

Grief in the Pandemic

"It shouldn’t take a pandemic to let grief run its course."

Lindsay Lee Wallace writes in "The unexpected gift of grieving in lockdown" about the welcome opportunity the pandemic gave her to have some time and space to mourn.

It was a testament to how unwell I’d been that I suddenly felt more at home.

Staying in was not only allowed, but mandated. I could eat fistfuls of cereal for every meal, wear the same sweatpants for days on end, and sleep in until the last possible moment.

I was fortunate to have a job that allowed me to work from home. Work, previously a venue of forced cheer and endless exclamation points, became softer. Every email was written with extra care—people had no idea what others were dealing with, could scarcely believe their own circumstances.

Without having to worry about colleagues at the next desk over, I could do what I needed most, and simply cry.

Helen Keller: We Bereaved Are Not Alone

 

We Bereaved Are Not Alone - Helen Keller

We bereaved are not alone.

We belong to the largest company in all the world, the company of those who have known suffering.
When it seems that our sorrow is to great to be borne, let us think of the great family of the heavy hearted into which our grief has given us entrance, and inevitably, we will feel about us their arms, their sympathy, their understanding.
Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world.

So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.

Rachel Brougham on Grief

 Rachel Brougham wrote about mourning the loss of her husband on Twitter.  The entire essay is well worth reading. An excerpt:

My life as I knew it changed in an instant. My future as I imagined was stolen. Grief changes your brain chemistry. It changes how you think, how you interact with others, how you work. It literally changes every single thing about your life. Think about that for a moment....You don’t “get through it.” You don’t “move on.” I carry this load every minute of every day and I hate it. I’m an over-achiever by nature and you don’t over-achieve at grief. I can’t “beat it.” Trust me, I’ve tried...I promise that someday you’ll finally be ready to throw your person’s hot sauce/shampoo/toothbrush/whatever away. And if you’re not there yet, that’s OK, too. I promise there will come a day when you can say their name and tell a story about them without tears streaming down your face. You’ll laugh again. And even have good days.

Judith Viorst Remembers Those She Loved Who are Gone - But Very Much Remembered

The incomparable Judith Viorst, author of classic books for children and Necessary Losses for adults, writes in Moment Magazine about the people she loved who are no longer here, and what remembering them means. 

An excerpt:

As I count the dead, my coulda’s and shoulda’s besiege me: I should have sat with Clara and heard her stories. I should have held my baby before he died. I could have been a more welcoming sister to Lois and not been such a meanie when she cried. I could have invited my in-laws to please come inside and stay a whole week instead of a weekend. I could have made more room in my heart—and made more time in my life—for the people who came knocking at my door. I could have mustered more grace and more good humor as I barreled through my kids-career-marriage days. I could have treated my “To-Do” list as something less, far less, than a sacred document. And although I figured out some of this in time to mend my ways, the regrets I have to live with, I’ll have to live with.

Ghana's dancing pallbearers - BBC Africa

Colbert and Cooper on Grief

“You wrote me a letter after my mom died,” he reminded Colbert. “In it you said, ‘I hope you find peace in your grief.’ One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is how we don’t really talk about grief and loss. People are not comfortable talking about it. . . . And you’ve spoken very publicly about what you experienced as a kid — a lot of it I didn’t know. I think a lot of people don’t know. So if you don’t mind, I wanted to talk to you a little about it and sort of how it has shaped who you are now.


...

Colbert: You become a different person. . . . You kind of re-form yourself in this quiet, grieving world. . . . It became a very quiet house and very dark. And ordinary concerns of childhood suddenly kind of disappeared. . . . I had certainly a different point of view than the children around me.”

Stephen Colbert answering Anderson Cooper’s question about grief

We Don't Move On From Grief -- We Move Forward

From the author of No Happy Endings and host of the Terrible, Thanks for Asking podcast

Modern Loss: Vilomah

October is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, and today, the 15th, has been designated a day of remembrance for pregnancy loss and infant death which includes, but is not limited to, miscarriage, stillbirth, SIDS or the death of a newborn.

We asked the Modern Loss community what words and phrases they use to illustrate this experience. The responses included "shattered," "homesick," "heartbreaking," and "searching." By far, though, the word with the strongest resonance is "vilomah," Sanskrit for "against a natural order." And, of course, this is the perfect term to describe the shattered dream of an eternal bond.

On this day and all others, we are sending love to all the vilomahs in our lives (and chances are great that you know more of them than you think). In this space, you will always be seen, heard and validated, and your lost loves will be missed by us all.

From Modern Loss

Jack Hamilton Says The Righteous Gemstones is a Comedy About Grief

The most hilarious and unexpectedly moving death scene you will see on television this year opens the season finale of The Righteous Gemstones, which airs Sunday night on HBO. The episode begins with a flashback to the death of beloved wife and mother Aimee-Leigh Gemstone, an unbearably sad moment for those present (her husband and three adult children) that rapidly descends into destructive chaos. The best slapstick has always been rooted in pain and a sense of cosmic injustice, and the scene, in all its uproarious brutality, finds the show’s characters processing death in a way that will feel familiar to anyone who’s lost a loved one: by flipping out and breaking shit.

Underlying the satire of megachurch Christianity is a hilarious but poignant portrait of a family coping with loss.

A Short Autobiographical Film from Matt Zoller Seitz About Loss, Grief, and Bed

Matt writes about it here.

"Disenfranchised Grief" -- Losing a Friend Can Be as Devastating as Losing a Family Member

The so-called hierarchy of grief, a scale used to determine who is considered a more legitimate mourner than others, puts family members at the top. For this reason, the death of a close friend can feel shunted to the periphery and has been described as a disenfranchised grief...Friends are psychological kin, that is, you may even have a stronger bond with friends than people you are related to by birth or marriage. So when a friend dies, the psychological and emotional stress can be as bad as the death of kin.

The death of a friend can be as traumatic as losing a family member

A Place to Leave A Memory: David Best "Temple" at the Renwick Gallery

New on Netflix: Grief Comedy/Drama "Dead to Me"

Tahitian Mourner's Attire

From the British Museum, worn by the chief mourner at ceremonies honoring Tahitians who were especially important in the community.

Grief is a Ball in a Box

Lauren Herschel describes grief:

So grief is like this:

There’s a box with a ball in it. And a pain button.
In the beginning, the ball is huge. You can’t move the box without the ball hitting the pain button. It rattles around on its own in there and hits the button over and over. You can’t control it - it just keeps hurting. Sometimes it seems unrelenting.

Over time, the ball gets smaller. It hits the button less and less but when it does, it hurts just as much. It’s better because you can function day to day more easily. But the downside is that the ball randomly hits that button when you least expect it.

For most people, the ball never really goes away. It might hit less and less and you have more time to recover between hits, unlike when the ball was still giant

No, We Don't Get Over It and That's The Way it Should Be

Love is forever, which means loss is forever, which means grief is forever. It hurts, but it keeps us close.

We will grieve forever because we love forever. There is no end to our love for our child, therefore there is no end to our grief– not in our lifetime, anyway. We will grieve forever. We will never get over it.

The presumption is that since our child’s death happened years ago– a presumably finite event– how are we not over it by now? As if child loss is something you can get over– likening it to something far less horrific that can be conquered if you only try hard enough, think positively, or pull yourself up by the bootstraps. As if it’s a hurdle you can easily jump over, or a roadblock you can simply go around and then move on. As if sunshine, rainbows and unicorns will magically greet you once enough time has passed and you cross into “I’m-over-it” land. This may work for other things, but not child loss.

It’s time to bust a long-standing myth about child loss and grief. There is no getting over it. Child loss is not something you get over. Ever. You don’t get over watching the living, breathing piece of your heart and soul, your flesh and blood, your child– die. It’s simply not. possible. to get over the death of your child. You will grieve the death of your child until your last breath.

Why We Will Never Get Over It

When Grief Feels Like Anger

“I’m just so angry all the time, and I don’t like it. I hate how angry I am.”

I looked into her eyes and replied, “I’m not sure you’re angry. Have you ever considered that you might be grieving, that you may be in mourning right now?”

“Wow,” she said. “I never thought about it that way. That’s exactly what it feels like.”

Almost immediately she could name everything she was lamenting the loss of.

Grief looks a lot like anger on the outside.

You’re Not Angry Right Now, You’re Grieving

Jo Firestone mourns the loss of a beloved friend, and recommends not reading that Joan Didion book. Once again, we see how people struggle to offer support -- and to accept it.

Someone is gone. Perhaps this is the first year you had to get used to it, or maybe you’ve had years of practice with how the calendar keeps going, and it’s still hard.

Either way, for right now I recommend getting in the bath.

Lie faceup if you want. I prefer facedown, coming up for air every few seconds like a nervous snorkeler. On a personal note, my bathtub is short, so I am forced to choose between submerging the top half of my body or submerging the bottom half. I always choose the top half, leaving my legs out of the water, looking like the first dolphin to live in an apartment.

Now onto a jigsaw puzzle, or doodling, or just stacking your mail into a Jenga-like pile. Anything that uses your hands more than your head. Stay in your robe all day, or if that’s too warm, try a shirt with no pants, like Winnie the Pooh. Eat something. Tell one of those people who keep saying, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do” that there is something they can do and it’s to bring you more pretzels — the good kind, or really any kind but the ones you bought last time, because those were bad. How can they make a pretzel bad? I don’t know, but they can, and they did and last time you bought them.

Tell Me One More Time What to Do About Grief

Don't Tell Mourners to "Stay Strong" -- Another in the What Not To Say To Sad People List

Megan Devine says:

It isn’t easy, but if we really want to support a grieving person, we’ve got to listen to his or her pain, rather than try to correct it. Pain, allowed expression, doesn’t have to turn in on itself. Given room — and validation — grief finds its right place, alongside the life that is built in the wake of loss.

'Stay Strong,' And Other Useless Drivel We Tell The Grieving